Progress notes: 10th October, 2006

[azhure]

New words: Still working on the second draft of Three times Three, 1,584 words rewritten today. Also went through and approved edits of another short, Shadow, which will be published soon.
Total words: 69,041 still on Thought and Memory. 3,637 on Three times Three.
Reason for stopping: Laptop battery died.

Exercise : 30 minutes walking.
Other work: I finally did the review that was overdue. And I also put together two more queries for Shaede and popped them into the post today.
Reading: Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Avatar.

I hate the whole image of artists (of any medium) being crazy or unbalanced. I really do.

It’s no secret that I’ve spent a good portion of my life suffering from clinical depression. I was diagnosed and placed on antidepressants several years ago. Apart from switching medications once, I’ve been on them solid. And they have worked. I don’t think anyone could get me to score as anything but “normal” on tests these days.

It’s also no secret that I hate being dependent upon these (or any) drugs. Most of the time I was on them, I was suffering through chronic illness and the stress of trying to finish a PhD while struggling with chronic illness. The PhD has been finished now (and looks great gathering dust) and while the illness is still there, it’s generally not as bad as it has been in the past.

So came the decision to try to wean off my antidepressants. I was on two types – a tricyclic and an SSRI. The tricyclic wasn’t too bad, apart from some disturbance in sleep. I thought the SSRI wasn’t going to be too bad either.

Until a week or so after the final dose. Cue severe nausea 24 hours a day and brain zaps to the tune of several dozen an hour. Brain zap? I hear you say. Imagine that every time you move your head, someone sticks a live electric wire in your brain. And scrambles your brain around in your head vigorously. And then somehow manages to keep all of the insides of your head still for a moment when you move, slapping them into place roughly when you stop moving.

That’s as close as I can get to them. Now, I could tolerate the zaps alone. Sometimes they were kind of fun. But the nausea was hell. I’m old hand at being nauseated. I spent good amounts of time with constant nausea as a child, often waking in the middle of the night from it. I suffer from acid reflux and have a hiatus hernia, both conditions that cause nausea. We’re old friends and I can cope with it.

Not this. I was living off ginger beer, trying any remedy I could get my hands on. Finally, after a weekend in which I was barely able to eat, I took a small dose of the SSRI.

After a few days, the nausea went away. I didn’t realise that my brain had been foggy, but it had. Today it’s clear, even after a fairly ordinary night of sleep. I’ve been productive.

I don’t want to be back on this drug permanently, and plan to wean down from this dose again. It scares me that my brain might need this drug. It really does. But maybe I do. Maybe I’ll have to stay on a low dose just to stay sane.

Maybe artists are crazy.

Mirrored from Stephanie Gunn.